Host Dave Schlom and Pascal Lee team up once again, this time to discuss Lee winning the Carl Sagan Prize from Wonderfest in the San Francisco Bay Area for his scientific research and gift for science communication.
In this episode, Lee recounts in detail what it was like to be Sagan's last student assistant at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Sagan's legacy as a science communicator inspires Lee to take his passion for the exploration of space in general and Mars in particular to the public, speaking to a wide array of audiences, from school kids to the general public.
Pascal also goes into detail on his take for the answer to the famous Drake Equation, where N equals the number of advanced civilizations beyond Earth, factoring in the number of stars, habitable planets surrounding them, and the emergence of life. Lee's opinion, based on science, is that that number may be astonishingly small!
